The Internal Revenue Service has announced that beginning January 1st, the mileage deduction for business use of cars and vans will increase to 50.5 cents a mile, up from the current 48.5 cents. Happy New Year.

Some years back, meetpete was charged with “accelerating” annual meeting sponsorship revenue for the Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA). My most profitable innovation proved to be printing a convention bureau’s logo on the tens of thousands of session evaluation forms distributed during the meeting. But my pride in engineering that creative brainstorm took a hit at the recent Annual Conference of the Association of National Advertisers, where the paper cards on which attendees wrote questions for speakers bore the logo of the Nielsen Company. Leaving me to wonder, “why didn’t I think of that?”

Groups, according to meetpete guest blogger Barbara Dunn of Howe, Hutton (www.howehutton.com), should attempt to negotiate a provision that “other than previously negotiated airline and corporate rates, the hotel will not offer any other lower group rates” over the dates of a meeting. But, she was quick to add, hotels cannot guarantee that attendees will not find lower rates elsewhere on the Internet.

“Rooms that have been sold to wholesalers such as priceline.com or expedia.com can be sold at whatever rate the wholesaler chooses. The hotel has no control over those rates.”